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Whyte: The world rendered as an alien landscape

At the heart of it, Wanda Koop is a landscape painter, at least for the most part, though that loose categorization might mess with your expectations a little bit. For the past three decades, Koop, a creative force hailing from Winnipeg, has been painting moody, indistinct scenes that call forth notions of post-apocalyptic nightmares or an inevitably bleak, hyper-industrialized near-future — which looks an awful lot like our present.

Koop’s central gift, though, is the ability to render these scenes without an ounce of pedantic scolding. Its full breadth will be on display at the National Gallery, when a major retrospective, On the Edge of Experience, opens in February. Meanwhile, her current show, Seeway, on at Birch Libralato, plies her familiar turf with the same quirkily engaging obliqueness as ever.

A shipbound Wanda Koop imagined a hyper-industrialized, and rather bleak, world on the islands she passed. (courtesy of the artist)

These paintings are the product of Koop’s recent journey on a Great Lakes freighter, and the work is at once familiar and refreshing. Those familiar with past bodies of work will no doubt make some visual links.

But there’s something new about Koop’s perspective here — the product, maybe, of taking a prairie girl and forcing her to find some sea legs. Most of the pieces are willful fantasy speculation regarding the semi-inhabited islands she drifted past. Her titles are hopeful guesses, vain attempts to personalize the passing experience; “William Lives on That Island” is a thatch of trees floating in a dripping, gauzy field of chilly greys and blues; the orange-pink halo surrounding the bridge in “Aganetha Lives on that Island” suggests the fading warmth of autumn into a blue-grey winter.

Shipboard though she may be, Koop is in familiar territory here, plying the widening rift between our built-up world and the natural realm. We take it for granted both as defilers, then spectators, watching, in our quietly disconnected way, as it slips past through the window of a car, plane or boat. Koop’s distant wondering here has an elegiac quality as a straightforward lament, but more profoundly, an alien perspective and fantasy imagining of something so distant that it almost never was.

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Speaking of fantasy, disconnect and alien perspectives, the gallery is also showing work by Kelly Richardson, whose own fascination with the modern landscape has a decidedly science-fiction drift. Earlier this year, the Art Gallery of Ontario showed Twilight Avenger, in which an irradiated, green-glowing buck grazed in a forest glade. At Birch Libralato, Richardson is showing The Erudition, a sterile landscape of desert and mountain playing host to on-again, off-again cathode-ray blue holographic trees.

As a companion to Koop, Richardson is ideal. The easy way to see her work is as straight-up critique of our general estrangement with nature, which is both well-trod territory and partly true. But Richardson’s contribution to the genre is both a technical virtuosity and a nerdy ambivalence that doesn’t critique our mediated world so much as take it as a given. As trees flicker and crackle in and out of frame, there’s a sense of a very distant future trying, in its techno-sterile way, to recreate virtually something it never actually knew. Richardson produces a future-world version of Koop’s fresh lament — a world that was, now not so much remembered as stored in the dull chill of a multi-terabyte hard-drive: gone, forgotten, but forever clickable.

Wanda Koop: Seeway and Kelly Richardson: The Erudition continue at Birch Libralato until Jan. 29. Wanda Koop: On the Edge of Experience opens at the National Gallery Feb. 11, 2011.

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